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The Whitman Massacre took place on Nov. 29, 1847, at Waiilatpu, a Christian mission on the Walla Walla River, when missionary Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and twelve male residents of the mission were murdered by a small band of Cayuse. The Cayuse blamed Whitman for a measles epidemic that had killed many members of the tribe, and also feared that he was bringing in too many white settlers. More than forty women and children, including E...
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The Whitman Massacre took place on Nov. 29, 1847, at Waiilatpu, a Christian mission on the Walla Walla River, when missionary Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and twelve male residents of the mission were murdered by a small band of Cayuse. The Cayuse blamed Whitman for a measles epidemic that had killed many members of the tribe, and also feared that he was bringing in too many white settlers. More than forty women and children, including Eliza Spalding, Lorinda Bewley, and the surviving Sager orphans Catherine, Elizabeth, Matilda and Henrietta, were subsequently taken captive by the Cayuse but were later ransomed by Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson Bay Company. Although only ten years old at the time of the massacre, Eliza played a vital role in that she was the only survivor who knew enough of the Cayuse language to be able to understand their captors. Her father, Henry Harmon Spalding, another white missionary stationed 120 miles away at Lapwai, had just left Eliza at the...
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textLetter (correspondence)Scanned from original text or image at 400 dpi saved in TIFF format, resized and enhanced using Adobe Photoshop, and imported as JPEG2000 using Contentdm software's JPEG2000 Extension. 2007